See Nikki McClure's art in book, exhibition

She might not think of it as that, and certainly she didn't intend it to be one. Unlike most of them, it contains very few actual words, only one or two per page.

Still, "Collect Raindrops: The Seasons Gathered" is very much the portrait of a life, albeit an elliptical and impressionistic portrait.

And it just might be the first biography written with an X-Acto knife.

McClure is an artist, and a celebrated one. She has published and illustrated a number of children's books. Her images have ended up in a wide variety of places from T shirts to album covers. And her yearly calendar is a must-have for thousands.

Her art form of choice is paper cutting, using an X-Acto to cut out shapes and lines from black paper. The resulting high-contrast images resemble woodcuts or 1930s WPA posters.

"Collect Raindrops: The Seasons Gathered" (Harry N. Abrams) is an anthology of images created for her popular yearly calendars, brought together in one volume and organized seasonally. The naturalistic images evoke a life lived in the presence of natural beauty during winter, spring, summer and fall. McClure says that they mostly came from her surroundings in her hometown, Olympia, Wash.

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"It's all autobiographical," she says by phone from her home there. "Most of these images come from about 200 yards from where I stand right now. There are a few pictures taken from different places -- one from Hawaii, one from Japan. But mostly it's identifiable as my life, though I would hope that it's universal in some sense."

About 40 pieces of McClure's work are on view in the new exhibition "Nikki McClure: Cutting Her Own Path, 1996-2014," at the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz though May 25. (The museum, at the McPherson Center, 705 Front St., is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays; www.santacruzmah.org.)

As shown in "Collect Raindrops," McClure's illustrations focus on everyday human interaction with nature, usually in a harmonious and serene way, whether it's discovering owls at night or playing violin among ferns in the forest. Californians, in fact, might look at the book with a kind of nostalgia, given that it's full of lush greenery -- rendered mostly in black and white -- and, Olympia being where it is on the Puget Sound, with lots and lots of water, in the form of rivers, lakes and rainfall.

Born and raised in Washington state, McClure, 45, first went to Olympia to attend the Evergreen State College. She studied natural history there and spent years, she says, searching for an art form that spoke to her.

"I really wanted to make a book of some kind," she says. "I had been trying out a number of different things -- woodcuts, linoleum cuts. It was a long process, and you had to work in reverse because of the way the prints were made, and sometimes I would forget to do the illustrations in reverse. I just wanted it to be more simple."

That's when an artist friend chimed in with a suggestion. "He said, 'Why don't you just cut paper?' I remember the very day he said it."

She tried it, drawing on black construction paper an apple falling from a tree, then cutting out what she had drawn with a blade. "This is exactly what (I'd) been trying to find for years," she says.

She quickly set out to create her book, a wordless handmade volume of images showing how to prepare an apple pie, featuring a bright-red apple in otherwise black-and-white illustrations. She published it and sold it locally.

From there, McClure decided to do a calendar featuring her cut-paper images, the first one appearing in the fall of 1996. The calendar became a hit item in Washington and elsewhere, and McClure has continued to create them.

"I was just doing them; I wasn't really thinking about the long term," she says. "You don't want to sit around and wait for the magic phone call."

But the magic phone call came anyway. A publisher who was enchanted by her illustrations wanted to make a book of her calendar pictures. The first edition of "Collect Raindrops" was released by Harry N. Abrams in 2007. The new book, a second edition, features more than 60 pages of new illustrations from her latest calendars, many of them accompanied by single words meant to evoke a particular spirit -- Delight, Incubate, Escalate.

McClure's books are gorgeous, but her original works have the dimensional effect of cut paper that the printed works can't quite duplicate. She cuts from solid black Strathmore charcoal paper, creating her central images not from what is there, but from what is cut away.